The UK’s Failure to Recognize Genocide
- Areeka Khan & Olivia Cash | Genocide Watch
- Mar 30
- 10 min read
United Kingdom All Party Parliamentary Group
The UK’s Failure to Recognize Genocide
Report By Genocide Watch
For years, the lawyers in the UK’s Foreign Office have refused to recognize mass killing as genocide until a court determines that genocide has occurred. There are several fatal legal errors in this approach.
Waiting for a court to declare genocide means violation of the duty to prevent genocide.
a) Nothing in the Genocide Convention requires that a court determine that genocide has been committed before government policy makers may use the term “genocide.”
b) Courts to try perpetrators of genocide are seldom created until a genocide is over.
c) Waiting for a court to determine that genocide has been committed means that use of the term nearly always comes too late to prevent it.
d) The Convention is named the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
e) The International Court of Justice in Bosnia v Serbia held that Serbia violated the Genocide Convention because it did not prevent the Srebrenica genocide. The ICJ also held that the duty to prevent is a peremptory norm that applies erga omnes (obliges all states.)
Genocide is a term defined by the binding law of an international treaty. Weaker terms are not.
a) Use of the term genocide as opposed to terms like crimes against humanity, “ethnic cleansing”, or atrocities has a significant effect on whether forceful action will be taken to prevent the crimes. See: Stanton, "Ethnic Cleansing" is a Euphemism Used for Genocide Denial.
b) When a weaker term is used, it is a sign that there will be no forceful action to stop the mass killing. When the killings are called “genocide”, forceful military action to stop it is much more likely. See: Stanton, Weak Words Are Not Enough. See also: Blum, Stanton, Sagi & Richter, “Ethnic cleansing” bleaches the atrocities of genocide.
By declaring “genocide” to be a sacred term only to be invoked by courts, the UK is surrendering its foreign policy to courts, and to the lawyers in the UK Foreign Office.
a) UK Foreign Office lawyers’ refusal to use the word genocide until the genocide is declared by a court means that the UK will nearly always violate its duty to prevent genocide.
b) Courts have no special expertise in the law of genocide. Judges are not high priests endowed with the sacred duty to determine the commission of genocide.
c) Foreign Office lawyers should be advising, rather than dictating, UK foreign policy.
Genocide is a term that should be applicable in determination of foreign policy.
a) If the term cannot be spoken, its power to define events and to determine policy is lost.
b) Genocide is a term that should be available to political policy makers, not just to Foreign Office lawyers.
c) By ceding a monopoly on the term “genocide” to Foreign Office lawyers, the UK Foreign Minister is handing them control over UK foreign policy.
By refusing to use the term “genocide” because courts haven’t declared it, the UK Foreign Minister has become a genocide denier.
a) Denial of genocide is the final stage of every genocide. It begins when genocide starts and may last for over a hundred years.
b) Genocide denial is the most predictive early warning of further and future genocide.
Refusal to call the crimes in Sudan “genocide,” tells genocidists they may kill with impunity.
Genocidists employ all the tactics of denial to counter accusations of their guilt. See: Stanton, Twelve Ways to Deny a Genocide.
Minimize the number of deaths.
Question the motivations of the truth tellers.
Claim the deaths were inadvertent.
Emphasize the strangeness of the victims.
Rationalize the deaths as the result of tribal conflict.
Blame “out of control” forces for committing the killings.
Avoid upsetting the “peace process.”
Avoid jeopardizing economic interests.
Claim the victims are receiving relief and good treatment.
Claim the events don’t fit the legal definition of genocide.
Blame the victims.
Say that peace and reconciliation outweigh blaming people for genocide.
The UK’s approach fails to PREVENT the crime of genocide as required by the Genocide Convention.
a) It allows UK leaders to avoid their responsibility to align UK policy with international law.
b) It provides the public with an excuse for non-action to protect lives of fellow human beings.
c) It washes the hands of UK leaders from their duty to prevent genocide.
The Sudan context: civil war and genocide
Since April 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been engaged in a fierce battle for control of Sudan. This brutal power struggle has killed over 60,000 people and has displaced millions.
Both parties and their allied forces are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They have deliberately and indiscriminately attacked civilians and civilian and humanitarian infrastructure.
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have committed genocide against the ethnic Masalit people and other non-Arab groups in West Darfur, carrying out 15,000 (since increased to 28,000) ethnic killings in El Geneina in 2023. Tens of thousands more civilians have been massacred by the RSF during this war. Women and girls, as young as one year old, have repeatedly been targeted for rape and sexual slavery by the RSF, often ethnically motivated. The RSF has destroyed 145 health facilities, depriving 65% of the Darfuri population of basic health care, and continues to use famine as a weapon of war by blocking humanitarian assistance from reaching IDP camps, such as the starvation-stricken Zamzam camp.
As was recognized by the US on the January 7th, 2025, the RSF therefore violates the following articles of the Genocide Convention: Article II (a): Killing members of the group, (b): Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, (c): Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, (d): Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
Over 30 million people in Sudan need humanitarian aid. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have aggravated the famine by barring all international and UN aid workers from Darfur in October 2024. SAF-allied militias have massacred villages of civilians, exemplified by the recent attack in Gezira state that left at least 26 dead at the hands of the Sudan Shield Forces.
Conflicts between the Arab dominated Sudanese government and non-Arab ethnic groups have resulted in numerous genocides targeting non-Arab people in Sudan. Genocide became Sudanese state policy when the Arab supremacist Arab Gathering seized power in Khartoum in 1983.
Since then, determined to dominate all of Sudan, the Sudanese army and Arab militias have massacred hundreds of thousands of non-Arab people in the Nuba Mountains, Darfur, the Blue Nile, and in South Sudan before South Sudan became independent. Over three million non-Arabs have been displaced.
In 2003-2005, government-backed Janjaweed militias carried out systematic killings of non-Arabs and a scorched earth policy in Darfur. They were supported by bombing by the Sudanese Air Force. They forcibly displaced Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa communities and murdered, looted, and mass raped non-Arab populations in Darfur. Janjaweed militias killed at least 300,000 non-Arab people and forcibly displaced 2.5 million.
A joint UN-AU peacekeeping force, UNAMID, was established in 2007 with a mandate to protect civilians. However, UNAMID became an observer mission, rather than a peacekeeping force. It failed to protect the hundreds of thousands of people in Sudanese IDP camps from rapes and murders. The Janjaweed militias became an official government force, renamed the "Rapid Support Forces" (RSF) led by General Hemedti.
Granted jurisdiction by the UN Security Council, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Omar al-Bashir and other leaders of the Darfur genocide for crimes against humanity and war crimes in 2009, and in 2010 for charges of genocide. Bashir appointed these same accused criminals as governors over areas where they committed their crimes.
Anti-government protests began in late 2018 and a military coup ousted Omar al-Bashir in 2019.UNAMID withdrew in December 2020. Although a civilian-led democracy was promised following the military coup, another military coup followed in 2021 which removed civilians from government. Generals Burhan and Hemedti shared power over Khartoum. The RSF took control over western Sudan, including Darfur.
In December 2022, the civilian opposition, General Burhan, and Hemedti signed a "new framework" which on paper would transition the government to civilian leadership and integrate the RSF into the Sudanese Armed Forces. But Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti) rejected proposals to integrate his Rapid Support Forces into Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). Failure to incorporate the RSF into the military and lack of cooperation between the SAF and the RSF resulted in civil war.
Fighting broke out between Hemedti’s RSF and Gen. Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces on April 15, 2023.
Since then, over 1000 civilians have been killed and more than 4,000 have been wounded in Khartoum and Omdurman, tens ofthousands have fled, with over 75,000 internally displaced. Over 100,000 people have fled from Sudan. The RSF took control of most of Khartoum. In March 2025, the SAF retook central Khartoum and Khartoum’s airport.
The massive influx of new refugees from Sudan threatens to overwhelm neighboring countries. Countries including the US, Canada, and France have evacuated their diplomats. Uncertainty exists regarding the location of Bashir. Hospitals are running out of supplies, and many health facilities have been directly hit by shells and gunfire. They lack electricity and medicines. The director of the UN's World Food Program (WFP) fears the conflict could result in a humanitarian crisis for all of Eastern Africa.
The RSF recommenced its attacks on the people of Darfur, especially the Masalit. In Darfur, the Rapid Support Forces have murdered over 30,000 Masalit, raped thousands of women, and driven tens of thousands of Masalit into Chad. Masalit towns have been destroyed, their wells poisoned, their streets strewn with corpses. The RSF has now surrounded El Fasher, a city of 2.5 million, capital of Darfur. Conquest of El Fasher by the RSF would create a humanitarian disaster and increased genocide.
Genocide Watch considers Sudan to be at Stage 8: Persecution and Stage 9: Extermination.
Genocide Watch recommends:
The UN Security Council should declare the war in Sudan is a threat to international peace and security.
The UNSC should authorize a UN Peacekeeping Force (PKO) under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter.
The UNSC should call on African Union and other countries to provide thousands of troops for the PKO.
The UNSC should make the PKO an ordinary expense of the UN, obligating all UN members to pay for it.
The UNSC resolution should refer the situation in all of Sudan to the International Criminal Court.
The PKO mandate should be to end the civil war by diplomacy or force and to protect civilians.
The mandate should include the arrest of both Gen. Burhan and Hemedti if they are charged by the ICC.
The UK’s past failings to prevent genocide in Sudan.
The UK has a history of failing to hold Sudan’s leadership to account for genocide and crimes against humanity. During the height of the first Darfur genocide in 2003-2006, the then UK ambassador William Patey effusively pledged the UK’s friendship to an audience of Sudanese politicians and businessmen in Khartoum, despite Bashir’s genocidal campaign against black Africans being well under way across Darfur.
In the 2010s, the appeasement of Sudan’s genocidaires took the form of the UK government’s support for businesses closely connected to the Bashir regime.
Today, the UK continues to prioritize commercial interests over its duty to prevent genocide in Sudan, namely by refusing to sanction the UAE for funding and arming the RSF. The UAE’s complicity in this genocide is well documented by UN experts, who reported in January 2024 that weapons and ammunitions shipments were being sent to the RSF by the UAE via Chad. By maintaining economic ties with the UAE and refusing to follow the US’s lead in sanctioning RSF companies that operate there, the UK benefits from the genocide in Sudan.
The UK is failing to meet its obligations under the Genocide Convention.
The UK has stated that it will wait for the ICC to make a determination of genocide in Sudan. However, the 1948 Genocide Convention states that governments, not courts, should regularly assess the risk of genocide and use “allmeans reasonably available” to prevent it. Governments of Canada, the US, France, Germany, New Zealand, and the Netherlands have all made previous determinations of genocide without an ICC conclusion.
On the 28th of October 2024, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy stated that only an appropriate court may deem a situation to constitute genocide, even when “millions of people have lost their lives”. Such an approach violates the Genocide Convention by failing to prevent genocide as required by Article One of the Convention and the opinion of the International Court of Justice in Bosnia v Serbia. It is contrary to the UK’s legal requirement that only a parliamentary vote can declare war – a decision as critical as a genocide determination.
This refusal by the UK to declare that genocide is occurring is de facto genocide denial. As long as the UK refuses to declare that the mass murders in Sudan constitute a genocide, the UK’s words of condemnation are nothing but empty and cowardly excuses for an absence of forceful actions to stop and prevent the genocide. Hindering prevention, the UK is enabling further genocide to take place in Sudan.
Recommendations urging the UK to change its passive stance:
The UK must officially recognize and declare the atrocities committed by the RSF and allied militias against the Masalit people to be genocide.
The UAE is actively facilitating and benefiting from the ongoing conflict in Sudan. The UK is fully aware that the UAE is supplying arms to the genocidal RSF. The UK must cease shielding the UAE from criticism and fulfill its responsibilities under the Genocide Convention. Imposing sanctions on the UAE is a necessary first step, but it is by no means sufficient.
As the UN Security Council penholder on Sudan, the UK has a clear responsibility to take concrete, decisive action in the UN to end the suffering and genocide in Sudan. The UK must urgently call for the deployment of a UN/AU intervention force to protect civilians and restore stability.
The UK must support the establishment of a civilian administration in Sudan as neither the SAF nor the RSF are fit to govern Sudan. The SAF’s track record as part of the Bashir regime clearly demonstrates its opposition to a democratic and pluralist political system.
